The Best Minds

“Brave and nuanced…an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.” —The New York Times

“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.” —Wall Street Journal

Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of college professors, the boys were best friends and keen competitors, and, when they both got into Yale University, seemed set to join the American meritocratic elite.

Michael blazed through college in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. But all wasn’t as it seemed. One day, Jonathan received the call: Michael had suffered a serious psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Michael was still in the hospital when he learned he’d been accepted to Yale Law School, and still battling delusions when he decided to trade his halfway house for the top law school in the country. He not only managed to graduate, but after his extraordinary story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie. But then Michael, in the grip of an unshakeable paranoid fantasy, stabbed Carrie to death with a kitchen knife and became a front-page story of an entirely different sort.

The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen’s brilliant and heartbreaking account of an American tragedy. It is a story about the bonds of family, friendship, and community; the promise of intellectual achievement; and the lure of utopian solutions. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, at times almost unbearably sad, The Best Minds is an extreme version of a story that is tragically familiar to all too many. In the hands of a writer of Jonathan Rosen’s gifts and dedication, its significance will echo widely.“Brave and nuanced . . . The Best Minds is too a thoughtfully built, deeply sourced indictment of a society that prioritizes profit, quick fixes and happy endings over the long slog of care . . . Effectively taking over his friend’s unfinished project, braiding it with his own story of clinical anxiety as well as skeins of history, medicine, religion and true crime, the author has transcended childhood rivalry by twinning their stories, an act of tremendous compassion and a literary triumph.” —The New York Times

“Immensely emotional and unforgettably haunting.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Haunting . . . Rosen tells this story with such a keen mix of compassion and eloquence we can’t help but hope there will be a twist that somehow saves everyone from the inevitably heartbreaking outcome . . . Throughout the book—which is part memoir, part manifesto—Rosen asks uncomfortable but crucial questions, some of them unanswerable, all of them compelling, and the result is an incisive but intimate tour de force that’s as much about Michael’s story as it is about the stories we tell as a culture—what we value, what we see, and what we do our best not to see even when it’s right in front of us . . . Masterful.” —The Washington Post

“This engrossing memoir centers on the author’s childhood friend Michael Laudor, who developed schizophrenia and, in his thirties, committed a horrific murder . . . Rosen thoughtfully interweaves this story with an account of changing attitudes toward mental illness.” —The New Yorker

“Jonathan Rosen’s The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions takes its title from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and could end up as just as enduring a work of American writing. Expect to see it on ‘Best Of’ lists, and plan to make space for its nearly 600 pages on your shelf. A memoir, a love letter, and a biblical tragedy all at once, it avoids easy answers but clings to difficult questions. A tale told with humility, it charts the path to hell by noting every good intention along the way.” —The New York Sun

“A shattering narrative.” —Sue Halpern, Yale Alumni Magazine

“It’s the darkest of literary triumphs, and the most gripping of unbearable reads.” —Simon Ings, The Telegraph (Five stars)

“Dazzling . . . both a breathtaking and tragic portrait of a man with vast potential and a reckoning on how schizophrenia is treated and understood. This is a tough one to forget.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
 
“Rosen is a novelist, and his literary imagination shapes the book like a novel…This artful, reflective and even entertaining book—one of the best of this or any year—is his powerful effort to take responsibility for changing minds, to persuade us of the danger of allowing compassion to obscure truth. The Best Minds manages to honor both.” —Elaine Showalter, Times Literary Supplement

“[A] well-written, affecting account.” —Booklist

“Intelligent, absorbing and heartbreaking, an intensely personal story. —Kevin Canfield, CrimeReads
 
“Rosen captures many worlds in this attentive, nuanced narrative, evoking boyhood discovery, the life of post-Shoah Jews in America, the rise of predatory capitalism, and the essential inability of one friend to comprehend fully the ‘delicate brain’ of the other. It’s an undeniably tragic story, but Rosen also probes meaningfully into the nature of mental illness. Throughout, he is keenly sensitive, as when he writes of the perils of self-awareness, ‘The flip side of the idea that writing heals you, perhaps, was the fear that failing to tell your story, and fulfill your dreams, cast you into outer darkness.’ An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“An astounding piece of work, at once a portrait of Laudor made of countless fine brush strokes, a tender memoir of adolescence and young adulthood and, above all, a forensic, unflinching exploration of the factors that led to Laudor’s public rise and bloody fall.” —Ben Machell, The Times

“[An] excruciating, riveting memoir . . . The Best Minds is an absorbing story of one man’s tragic life. But it is also an important examination of how much we know and can do — and, more crucially, how little.” —Star Tribune
 
“Heart-rending. . . Almost every page is filled with poignant observations, subtle ironies and a commentary pregnant with the unbearable weight of future knowledge. There are tragic echoes of The Great Gatsby.” —Andrew Anthony, Observer

“An ‘American tragedy’ but one with universal relevance, The Best Minds combines a tender and touching story of friendship with a brutal indictment of how we neglect the mentally ill in our society at our peril.” —Caroline Sanderson, Editor’s choice, The Bookseller

“This book gets you in its grip from the first pages. It is the opposite of a magic trick: nothing is hidden but the revelations are constantly stunning, a testament to Jonathan Rosen’s sheer skill as an author. The Best Minds is a heartbreaking story and an astonishing work of art, its tragedy rendered with unbounded humanity and depth.” —Stephen J. Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio
 
“With bracing honesty, Jonathan Rosen tackles one of medicine’s greatest mysteries, the origins and outcomes of maladies of the mind. In artful prose and with a compassionate voice, he takes us on a journey from childhood to academia to locked institutions. Not always easy to read but well worth it, The Best Minds is a work of nuance and insight that triggers thought and pulls at the heart.” —Jerome Groopman, MD, Recanati Professor Harvard Medical School; author of How Doctors Think; coauthor of Your Medical Mind (with Dr. Pamela Hartzband)
 
“In this riveting narrative, Jonathan Rosen guides us through his lifelong friendship with Michael Laudor, a young boy of exceptional promise who becomes a young man exceptionally ill with schizophrenia. This cautionary tale reminds us that schizophrenia is a formidable foe. For even the best minds, the illness can be devastating, subverting its own treatment. And for those who love someone afflicted with schizophrenia, our best instincts for compassion and accommodation can lead to dire consequences. But The Best Minds is not only about genius and madness. It is about how all of us approach what we can’t understand and how each of must do better for those who can’t fend for themselves.” —Thomas Insel, MD, former director, National Institute of Mental Health and author of Healing
 
“A moving evocation of childhood friendship that morphs into a devastating evocation of mental illness. Rosen is persistently judicious and precise. The result is a harrowing tour de force.” —Peter D. Kramer, author of Death of the Great Man and Listening to Prozac

“This is that rare book that deftly works on several levels at once while remaining a compulsive read: as a narrative of a complex friendship; a cautionary tale about the price of intellectual ambition; and a clash between the unholy alliance of psychoanalytic and literary theory and the grim vicissitudes of reality. Jonathan Rosen writes with searing intelligence and admirable candor about his role in what is ultimately a heartrending story. As unobtrusively researched as it is deeply reflective, informed by a humane and comprehending voice, The Best Minds delivers on its own vaulting ambition. It is nothing short of a contemporary masterpiece.” —Daphne Merkin, author of 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love and This Close to Happy

“I am not sure when I last read a nonfiction book as satisfying as The Best Minds. It’s a memoir, a medical mystery, the story of a close male friendship, a clear-eyed look at the criminal justice system, and, in a weird way, an academic satire, revealing Ivy League foibles that would make you laugh if they didn’t make you tear your hair out, painfully. Jonathan Rosen has written a long book that felt too short; I wanted it to keep going and going.” —Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill
 
“The Best Minds is one of the best books about mental illness I have ever read. Its grand sweep takes in the nuanced cultural history of ideas and policies regarding people with severe illness. Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon did this for depression, and Scott Stossel’s My Age of Anxiety for anxiety. Those books, both superb, are grounded in memoir as well, but the specific horror of Rosen’s makes it especially unforgettable.” —Sally Satel, Commentary Magazine
 
“The Best Minds is a carefully crafted and beautifully written tale illustrating the failure of our mental illness treatment system. The irony of the title is that the ‘best minds’ did not understand that paranoid schizophrenia is a brain disease, not a behavioral choice. On any given day 40 percent of the 9 million Americans with serious psychiatric disorders are receiving no treatment. The Laudor story, with elements of the Ivy League and Hollywood, was high-profile but other tragedies quietly occur in the US every day.” —E. Fuller Torrey, MD, author of American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System

“I was gripped from the start by Jonathan Rosen’s skill as a novelist as he tells the story of two boys, both alike in dignity and gifts, and the tragic impact of severe mental illness on their different life trajectories. The book is a kind of lighthouse, pointing out the dangers ahead if we don’t pay attention to those small number of people with severe mental illness, who pose a risk to others, and who need long term care from professionals: not from desperate families and partners. It is a must-read for those who are interested in mental health services, and should be required for those in government who have any influence on mental health policy. The Best Minds has its own strange and terrible beauty, and despite the tragedy described therein, it is also a tribute to human love and hope for better things.” —Gwen Adshead, forensic psychiatrist and author of The Devil You Know

“A work of intimacy, scope and sweeping power, this epic book reads like a classic American novel. Both a heart-rending tragedy and a story of love and companionship, The Best Minds is utterly compelling.” —Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide
 
“As a primer to the cultural and political concerns that emerged from the Sixties, it is second to none … Like all great American texts it is the detail and the flow of ideas that gives it power. This is social and intellectual history of the most powerful sort.” —Brian Morton, The Tablet

“Incredibly moving and panoramic work . . . Rosen’s writing can break your heart . . . A worthy and incisive read.” —New York Journal of Books

“Deeply personal, by turns sad, angry, empathetic, and, yes, funny, “The Best Minds” is a must-read account of the manifestations and mysteries of psychosis and the failures of our nation’s mental health institutions.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
 
“This devastating memoir will break your heart . . . In The Best Minds, Rosen breaks his silence, and the heart of any empathetic reader. It is a wrenching double memoir about converging and violently diverging lives.” —The Forward
 
“To say that this is a memoir, a case study, or a book about schizophrenia is to dramatically undersell it. Though Rosen’s lens is particular, his view is panoptic. This is a magisterial work, as much a sociological study of late 20th-century America as it is a book about madness. It is also a book about childhood and friendship, the long shadow of the second world war and its unexpected intellectual legacy, about ambition and delusion and the danger of stories.” —David Shariatmadari, The GuardianJonathan Rosen is the author of two novels: Eve’s Apple and Joy Comes in the Morning, and two other works of non-fiction: The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds and The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature. His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous anthologies. He lives with his family in New York CityChapter One

The Suitable Playmate

When you were a small boy, the aim of the suitable playmate could not have been more perfectly fulfilled: across the street was Michael Laudor, the ideal friend. A
brilliant peer.

-Cynthia Ozick, letter to the author

My family moved to New Rochelle in 1973. There were good schools, green lawns, and quaint signs painted in the 1920s bearing legends like only forty-five minutes from broadway and city of homes, churches and schools, though there were four synagogues and Metro North got you to Manhattan-the rock around which all life revolved-in thirty-three minutes. But the real reason we moved to New Rochelle was so that I could meet Michael.

That, at least, is what my mother’s best friend, the writer Cynthia Ozick, told me:

I heard much of Michael Laudor when you were growing up. And in a way even before you knew of his existence, in this sense: that Michael, or someone like him, was always the goal in choosing where to buy a house.

Michael, in other words, was inevitable. I was destined to meet him, or at least someone like him, because friendship cannot actually be foretold any more than madness or the day of your death. Can it?

I met Michael soon after we moved in, as I was examining a heap of junk that the previous owners had left in a neat pile at the edge of our lawn. I was looking for relics of the three athletic boys who had lived there, and wondering if a small aquarium was worth salvaging, when a boy with shaggy red-brown hair and large tinted aviator glasses walked over to welcome me to the neighborhood.

He was taller even than I was, gawky but with a lilting stride that was oddly purposeful for a kid our age, as if he actually had someplace to go. His habit of launching himself up and forward with every step, gathering height in order to achieve distance, was so distinctive that it earned him the nickname Toes.

I didn’t learn he was called Toes until fifth grade started, when I learned he was also called Big. The shortest kid in class was called Small, and when they lined us up in height order, Big and Small were bookends. Sensitive teachers sometimes let the short kids go first, which I’m sure did wonders for their self-esteem.

Big is less imaginative than Toes, but how many kids get two nicknames? And Michael was big. Not big like Hal, who appeared to be attending fifth grade on the GI bill, but through some subtle combination of height, intelligence, posture, and willpower.

In Brookline-the Boston suburb where my family had lived for three years before moving to New Rochelle-I’d been taller than all my friends, but nobody would have called me Big. I settled too easily at the bottom of myself in a shy sediment. Michael was only an inch or two taller than me, and just as skinny, but he seemed to enjoy taking up space, however awkwardly he filled it.

Even standing still he had a habit of rocking forward and rising up on the balls of his feet, trying to meet his growth spurt halfway. He stood beside me on Mereland Road in that unsteady but self-assured posture, rising and falling like a wave. He was socially effective the same way he was good at basketball-through uncowed persistence.

I often heard in later years that people found him intimidating, but for me it was the opposite. Despite my shyness-or because of it-Michael’s self-confidence put me at ease. Perhaps because I was conscious of the awkwardness that he overcame, or simply refused to recognize, I fed off his belief in himself.

Besides, being shy is not the same as being modest. The same expectation shaping his life was shaping mine; the belief that your brain is your rocket ship and that simply as a matter of course you are going to climb inside and blast off. Propelled by some mysterious process-never specified, almost mystical and yet entirely real-we would outsoar the shadow of ordinary existence and think our way into stratospheric success.

Michael told me his name and my name, too, which he shortened to Jon. He liked to give the answer before the question, and offered his opinion that if the former owners had thrown out the fish tank, it probably leaked even if it didn’t look cracked. I’ve never liked having my name abbreviated but I didn’t correct him.

It’s possible his mother had sent him. Ruth Laudor was a neighborly woman who came over herself at some point to welcome us-and sometimes came over to escape the roar of her own household-but Michael’s geniality and supreme self-confidence were his own. Even then, he seemed like the ambassador of his own country.

It was Michael who pointed out that while my house was first on the block, it was number 11 not number 1, something I’d never have wondered about because numbers were always unpredictable, even without the “new math” that had been introduced in the sixties so we could win the Cold War. I didn’t know it was called new math, only that having been shown a decimal point in fourth grade, I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to figure out where to put it.

Michael knew, and played me a song by Tom Lehrer called “New Math,” one of many songs and records we spent hours listening to in his living room. The joke of “New Math” was that it was so simple “that only a child can do it,” which is to say it was a song for adults, which was part of its special pleasure. Michael never believed in the line separating children from adults, or many other lines either.

The Tom Lehrer album was ten years old but new to me, full of names and concepts Michael cheerfully glossed-the Vatican; Wernher von Braun-that gave it an archaic but cutting-edge quality, like the Doc Savage mysteries he also introduced me to.

Michael often seemed like someone who had lived a full span already and was just slumming it in childhood, or living backward like Benjamin Button or Merlin. My parents were amused by the speed with which he took to calling them Bob and Norma, and the unabashed way he looked them in the eye as he cursed the bombing of Cambodia or discussed the Watergate scandal while I waited for him to finish so we could play Mille Bornes or go outside. I knew the president was a crook, but Michael knew who Liddy, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were, and what they had done, matters he expounded as if Deep Throat had whispered to him personally in the schoolyard just behind his house.

Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School was so close, Michael told me, I could wake up fifteen minutes before the bell, eat breakfast, and still get to class on time. Michael treated the schoolyard, which had outdoor basketball hoops, like an extension of his backyard.

I could see the roof of the school building from the window of my mother’s attic office, its ornate cupola suggesting a fancy barn or a village church. I could see Michael’s roof from my own window, screened by branches. There were only six or seven houses on the whole street. The Laudors, number 28, were diagonally across and down; a knight’s move away on a chessboard.

Michael gave me a tour of the Wykagyl shopping center, two blocks from my house, where there was a store called Big Top that sold toys in the back and candy in the front, an A&P, a pizza place, and a pet shop where I could get a new aquarium. Guppies cost ten cents apiece.

Michael was the sort of guide who didn’t just point out George’s Hair Fort, he told you the names of all four Italian brothers who cut hair there. I could only ever remember Rosario, who cut my hair. He cut my father’s hair, too, and called out, Professore! when he walked in. He called Michael’s father professore too.

That was something else we had in common. Our fathers were college professors, though my father taught German literature and Michael’s father taught economics. Also, my father was bald on top, with wings of white hair on either side of his head; Michael’s father had a dark pompadour combed dramatically back, like the greasers he’d grown up with on the Brooklyn waterfront.

The following year, Mr. Summa-who had given up working at the 7-Up bottling plant to become our sixth-grade teacher-started calling Michael “professor” after overhearing him use the word “epiglottis” to tell a joke about hiccups, thus giving him a third nickname.

Michael might have been the reason my parents chose Mereland Road, but my mother’s friend Cynthia was the reason they’d chosen New Rochelle. Cynthia and my mother were both writers, with an all-consuming devotion to literature, a shared commitment to feminism, and a dark awareness of the Holocaust, the black backing of the mirror they held up to reality that made the reflected world visible. They talked on the phone every day. When they got off the phone, they wrote long letters, and when they received each other’s letters, they called, because there could never be too many words, though the written word was the only medium that truly mattered.

Cynthia lived in New Rochelle’s south end, which had been settled in the seventeenth century by Huguenots-French Protestants fleeing the persecution of Louis XIV. Her house was in walking distance to the train station, the Long Island Sound, and a Victorian house in Sutton Manor that my mother had fallen in love with. But the neighborhood, and my mother’s dream house, were “quickly dismissed,” Cynthia told me, “because of the absence of any Jewish ambiance.” This objection came from my father. “The chief reason was to live in an area where there would be children appropriate for befriending.”

Appropriate children lived in the north end, where Jews had been settling since the postwar boom. Rob Petrie-the fictional comedy writer played by dapper Dick Van Dyke-lived in a generic suburb called New Rochelle. Carl Reiner-the bald Jew who based The Dick Van Dyke Show on his own life but wasn’t allowed to play himself-lived in the north end of New Rochelle.

So did Jerry Bock and Joe Stein, the composer and book writer of Fiddler on the Roof, a musical about a poor Jew who dreams about being a rich Jew, which was beloved by rich Jews who dreamed about being poor Jews, or at least remembered their grandparents who’d been poor Jews once themselves. The musical had closed on Broadway only two years before, after becoming a movie. Even my parents had the cast album, though my father considered it a Jewish minstrel show and my mother dismissed it as middlebrow schlock.

Jews had moved to New Rochelle to escape New York City, then moved to the north end to escape the troubled parts of New Rochelle, which wasn’t a true suburb but a small city in its own right. There were housing projects as well as golf courses, and a once-thriving downtown killed by the departure of a department store whose arrival had also killed it, which was more than I could follow but was the sort of thing they talked about with knowing assurance in Michael’s house.

The big Conservative synagogue my father wanted us to join, Beth El, had relocated from downtown to the leafier north end and opened its new sanctuary in 1970. Between my mother’s dream house in the south and Beth El in the north lay a patchwork of old Irish and Italian working-class neighborhoods, fancy developments, integrated middle-class neighborhoods, a moribund Main Street, and a highway-fractured zone that like the housing projects were largely Black.

And so instead of streets with opulent and evocative names like Sutton Manor and Echo Avenue, we moved to Mereland Road. The “mere” in Mereland must once have denoted a body of water, but for my mother the “mere” had devolved into its pedestrian homonym: nothing more.

There was no view of the water, only the blind exterior of Beth El looming over North Avenue. Designed by a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, the building was windowless as a power station or a mausoleum but a comfort to my father, who was making peace with the Jewish observance he’d abandoned in retaliation for God’s abandonment of his parents thirty years before, when they were murdered along with one out of every three Jews in the world.

Our neighborhood was called Wykagyl. The word is believed to be a corruption of an Algonquin name used by the Lenape, though it sounded vaguely Yiddish as pronounced by my father, who had erased a good deal of his accent but who still said his w’s like v’s. If you never understood why the Marx Brothers thought “viaduct” could be mistaken for “why a duck,” then you never heard my father say Wykagyl.

Our next-door neighbor, Mr. Fruhling, a refugee from Germany who made me squeeze his eighty-year-old bicep (rock hard, he used dumbbells), also said his w’s like v’s. So did his tough, tiny sister, who lived in the house with him. So did Harry Gingold, a Holocaust survivor from Poland who lived one street over and gave out the honors at Beth El during Sabbath services, sidling up to congregants and murmuring furtively when it was time to open the ark, as if he were giving a tip on a horse.

To my sister and me he was a comic figure, but to my father he was part of the invisible fellowship of refugees it was his soul’s secret work to gather up. My father could pinpoint an accent and locate the sorrow behind it the way Sherlock Holmes could spot a limp and account for the accident that caused it at a glance.

Once, in a coffee shop, while Michael and I played tabletop soccer with three pennies and sugar packet goalposts, my father divined the wartime history of a waitress-Romania, Paris, the Pyrenees, Spain, Palestine, the Bronx-between the ordering of dessert and the bringing of the check. Even allowing for the brewing of a fresh pot of decaf-my father’s one constant demand in life-it was an impressive performance, especially because the information wasn’t journalistically extracted but offered in telegraphic exchanges sparked by mutual recognition. As we were leaving, my father murmured, “Her whole family. Auschwitz.”

Michael was fascinated by such displays, and in his way had a similar impulse. Friends might notice my father had an accent, but Michael asked where he was from and how he’d gotten out of Vienna, and incorporated the information into his way of referring to my father and perhaps me. He incorporated my father’s accent, too, which he began imitating almost immediately; not with malice, but more the way you might commit someone’s telephone number to memory.US